A local citation is a mention of a business's name, address and phone number on a website that is not its own. A listing on Yell is a citation. A profile on Checkatrade is a citation. Your own website is not, because you are the source.
From there, most guides look alike: they list the directories you should sign up to, often fifty or a hundred of them. Yelp, Foursquare, Hotfrog, FreeIndex, Brownbook. We checked whether those names actually appear in UK results, counting the domains on the first page of six local service searches. The short answer: most of them do not, and the portals that matter in the UK are mostly different ones.
What counts as a citation and what does not
The working distinction is between structured and unstructured citations. Structured citations are listings in a fixed format: a name field, an address field, a phone field, a business category. Yell, Checkatrade, Treatwell and TheFork work this way. Unstructured citations are mentions in free text: a local newspaper article that names the restaurant and the street, a post in a neighbourhood Facebook group, the "where to find us" page of a supplier.
A citation is not a backlink, even when it contains a link. A link passes authority; a citation passes confirmation: it tells Google that the business exists at that address and that several independent sources agree. Google says so in the official Business Profile documentation: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results" (Google Business Profile Help). On the same page the three local ranking factors are relevance, distance and prominence, and citations feed into the third.
Which portals actually appear in UK search results
We pulled six "service + city" searches on Google UK, desktop, and sorted the organic results on page one into three groups: portals that list several businesses, sites of individual businesses, and everything else (social networks, forums, newspapers). That gave 57 results in total, because three of the six pages showed nine organic results rather than ten.
| Search | Local pack listings | Portals in organic results | Individual business sites | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| plumber london | 3 | 3 | 7 | 0 |
| dentist manchester | 3 | 3 | 6 | 0 |
| electrician birmingham | 3 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| hairdresser leeds | 3 | 6 | 0 | 3 |
| solicitor bristol | 3 | 1 | 9 | 0 |
| accountant glasgow | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 |
| Total | 18 | 24 | 29 | 4 |
On average, four results in ten on page one belong to portals that list businesses rather than to businesses. On "hairdresser leeds" there is not a single salon website in the organic results: Treatwell and Fresha take six positions and the rest goes to the Yorkshire Evening Post, Facebook and Mumsnet. On "accountant glasgow" portals hold six of nine. "solicitor bristol" is the opposite case: nine law firm sites and a single portal, ReviewSolicitors.
All six pages also carry a "Find results on" box that links straight to directory pages. That is where the UK generalists show up: Gumtree and Yell in four searches out of six, Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Trustpilot in two, Cylex, 192.com and Thomson Local in one.
Here are the portals in the organic results, counted by the number of searches they appear in.
| Portal | Searches (out of 6) it appears in | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | 2 | trades |
| Gumtree | 2 | classifieds |
| Treatwell | 1 (three results) | beauty |
| Fresha | 1 (three results) | beauty |
| InvoiceBerry | 1 (two results) | accountant directory |
| TrustATrader | 1 | trades |
| NICEIC | 1 | electricians' register |
| HaMuch, TaskHer | 1 each | trades |
| StarOfService | 1 | services |
| Unbiased | 1 | financial advisers and accountants |
| ReviewSolicitors | 1 | legal reviews |
| dentaldentist.co.uk, DentistAlert, Dental Choices | 1 each | dental directories |
| Indeed, ACCA Careers | 1 each | job boards |
| Yell, Thomson Local, Cylex, 192.com, MyBuilder, Trustpilot | 0 (only in the "Find results on" box) | generalists and reviews |
| Yelp, Foursquare, Hotfrog, FreeIndex, Brownbook | 0 | generalists |
The directories everyone recommends and we never saw
Yelp, Foursquare, Hotfrog, FreeIndex and Brownbook appear nowhere on the six pages: not in the organic results, not in the local pack, not in the "Find results on" box. They are the same names repeated in every list of "best UK business directories", partly because those lists are copied from American articles, where Yelp is a consumer habit. In the UK the habit belongs to Checkatrade for trades, Treatwell and Fresha for beauty and, among generalists, Yell and Gumtree.
That does not mean signing up does harm. It means the return is close to zero, and there is a test that puts a number on it. In Italy, the agency Local Strategy created 50 citations on five general directories and checked how many were indexed: 26 after one month, 2 after six months, or 4% of the total (Local Strategy, June 2025). A listing Google does not index is not a confirmation: it is a row in a database nobody reads.
Citations have been losing weight for ten years
Since 2008 Whitespark has published the Local Search Ranking Factors, the survey in which a panel of local search specialists weights the factors behind local rankings. The 2026 edition, released on 6 November 2025, collects the votes of 47 experts on 187 factors. At the top for the local pack are the primary Google Business Profile category (score 227), the searcher's proximity (225) and keywords in the business name (223). Citation signals keep slipping, as they have every year for a decade (Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026).
The panel is largely North American and the result should be read as such, but the direction matches what we see in the UK. In four of the six searches we measured, the local pack goes to listings with hundreds of reviews, not to businesses with lots of directory entries. The first local result for "plumber london" has 180 reviews averaging 5.0; the second has 404 averaging 4.9. On "hairdresser leeds" the first listing has 2,100 reviews. Where competitors have few reviews, few are enough: the "accountant glasgow" pack includes practices with 2 and 9 reviews.
If you want the full picture of what moves rankings outside your own pages, we covered it in off-page SEO and, for how the three boxes at the top work, in local pack.
Why they matter again with AI search
The topic is back in circulation because of how conversational assistants build an answer about a local business, not because of Google rankings. When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommend a dentist in a city, they have no access to your booking system: they read what they find written elsewhere, and what they find are portal listings.
In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, run on 1,002 adult US consumers, 45% say they have used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to get a recommendation for a local business, against 6% the year before. 40% say they trust the recommendations of those platforms, and Apple Maps use rose from 14% to 27% (BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026). These are US figures, and anyone presenting them as UK data is using them wrongly.
What can be said about the UK is the scale of the problem, not the percentage. At the end of June 2026 there were 5,516,377 companies on the UK register; in the quarter 192,287 were incorporated and 156,515 dissolved (Companies House, Incorporated companies in the UK, April to June 2026), and that count leaves out sole traders. A hundred and fifty thousand dissolutions a quarter are also a hundred and fifty thousand sets of listings left online with details that no longer match anything, and general directories rarely clean them up.
On how visibility works inside generated answers we wrote how to appear in ChatGPT answers and, for the wider picture, what generative engine optimisation is.
Which listings to start with in the UK
The order below comes from the two criteria that can be checked: appearing in the UK results measured above, and being a source that feeds other platforms.
- Google Business Profile. The six searches show 18 local pack listings, all above the first organic result. It is the one citation that is seen before the rest of the page. How to fill it in completely is covered in how to optimise Google Business Profile.
- Apple Business Connect. It feeds Apple Maps and Siri. It takes half an hour, you do it once, and few of the guides on page one mention it.
- Bing Places. It brings little direct traffic and it matters for Copilot, which reads the Bing index.
- The vertical for your category. Checkatrade, TrustATrader or MyBuilder for trades, the NICEIC register for electricians, Treatwell or Fresha for hair and beauty, ReviewSolicitors for law firms, Unbiased for accountants, TheFork and Tripadvisor for restaurants. In our count these portals appear more often than the generalists, and when they appear they tend to sit near the top.
- Yell and Gumtree. The only generalists we found on page one, in the "Find results on" box of four searches out of six, and Gumtree in the organic results of two.
Everything else is optional, and should be decided by looking at the results for your category and your city, not at a generic list. For a restaurant the picture is different from a law firm's: we measured it in restaurant SEO and in SEO for law firms.
How to check consistency in half an hour
The check does not need a tool subscription. It needs you to decide first which version of your details is the right one, and then to search for it.
- Write down the canonical version: the business name as registered (or your trading name, used the same way everywhere), the address with the same abbreviation throughout (always "Road" or always "Rd", not both), one phone number, one email address.
- Search Google for your phone number in quotation marks. Every result is a citation. If two different numbers come up for the same business, you have found the main problem before looking for anything else.
- Repeat with the business name in quotation marks and with the address in quotation marks. The three lists together are the real map of your citations.
- Mark which listings you can claim and edit yourself, which need a correction request and which sit on dead portals. Leave the last group alone.
- Fix the listings that appear on page one for your main search first. They are the ones customers see and the ones language models read.
If you would rather fold the check into a wider review, the order of checks is the one we use in an SEO audit.
The mistakes we see most often
- The advertising agency's phone number. Businesses that ran campaigns with call tracking numbers find that number frozen on twenty portals. When the contract ends, twenty listings point to a number nobody answers.
- Two Google listings for the same address. It happens when a business changes name or legal form and creates a new profile without closing the old one. Report the duplicate; do not ignore it.
- The half-finished move. Website and Google listing updated, portal listings still at the old premises. The customer goes to the wrong address and leaves a one-star review.
- Bulk submissions. Packages promising "300 directories in 48 hours". The Local Strategy test above shows how many of those listings end up indexed.
- The wrong category. In the Whitespark survey the primary Google Business Profile category is the factor with the highest score. Getting it wrong costs more than twenty missing citations.
Frequently asked questions
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. A NAP citation is a mention of a business's name, address and phone number on a site that is not its own: a Yell listing, a Checkatrade profile, a line in a local newspaper article. It confirms to search engines that the business exists at that address.
They count, but less than people claim. In Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors 2026, citation signals keep losing weight as they have for a decade, while the primary Google Business Profile category, proximity and reviews stay at the top. Consistent details remain a requirement: Google states that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to appear in local results.
There is no number, and it is the wrong question. In a test run in Italy, Local Strategy found that of 50 citations created on general directories only 2 were still indexed after six months. It is better to look after five platforms that appear in the results for your category than to sign up to three hundred directories.
In our count of six UK local searches Yelp does not appear in any of the 57 organic results, nor in the local pack or the Find results on box, and the same goes for Foursquare, Hotfrog, FreeIndex and Brownbook. In the UK the generalists we found on page one are Yell and Gumtree.
Industry directories, where they exist. On hairdresser leeds, Treatwell and Fresha take six of the nine organic results; on electrician birmingham, Checkatrade is the first organic result and the NICEIC register the second; on accountant glasgow, portals hold six results out of nine. General directories matter mostly where no strong vertical exists.
A portal listing is a second landing page
In the six searches we measured, 24 organic results out of 57 are portals. For a local business this means page one of Google is not a race for a single spot: there is the position of your own site and there is the position you hold inside the Checkatrade, Treatwell or Gumtree listing, which often ranks higher.
In the industry citations get counted. Hardly anyone treats them as pages to come first on, with a decent photo, a written description and recent reviews at the top. It is a job of hours, not months, and in the meantime the listing also becomes the text a language model will use to describe the business to someone asking for a recommendation. On an industrial client we saw a well-written page take a keyword from position 88 to 2 in five years: the principle is the same at local scale, and the timescales are much shorter. The case is told in full in SEO for manufacturing, and if you want to see how we work on other projects, everything is on the projects page or in our SEO service.
